Pleasure is Power: The Pleasure Art of Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

Pleasure is Power: The Pleasure Art of Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron

Arts + Literature Laboratory presents Pleasure is Power: The Pleasure Art of Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron on display from Friday, January 10, 2025 through Saturday, March 1, 2025.

A "First Look" for the new exhibitions will be held Friday, January 10, 2025 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. Note: this will be a mask-required event.

An opening reception for the new exhibitions will be held Friday, January 24, 2025 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. This event will be mask-optional. 

Exhibition Statement:

Pleasure is Power: The Pleasure Art of Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron is celebration of Pleasure Art and Activism. Through photographs, film, and collage, Schalk and Waldron invite audiences into intimate and public spaces where pleasure is a liberatory and political act that centers joy and self-love as tools for a collective revolution.

Sami Schalk

Sami Schalk (she/hers) is a fat, Black, queer, disabled pleasure artist and professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison who celebrates and centers pleasure as a tactic for healing and liberation. Her scholarship focuses on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. Schalk is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) and Black Disability Politics (2022). Schalk has received art commissions from the Ford Foundation Gallery, NYC (2020). Her art was most recently featured in the exhibition, Indisposable (2020-2022).

Photographer Sam Waldron

Sam Waldron

Sam Waldron (she/hers) is a visual artist based in Madison, Wisconsin whose work centers queer joy, fat liberation, disability pride, and pleasure activism. While her medium is photography, the powerful experience of being truly seen and celebrated plays a pivotal role in the art that she creates with her subjects, collaborators, and co-conspirators, and is as much a part of the final product as the images themselves. As a queer, fat, disabled woman, Waldron reflects the inherent value and worthiness of her subjects in her work with a deep reverence. Sam is a long-standing contributor to Our Lives magazine, and her art has been most recently featured in the Ford Foundation Gallery exhibition, Indisposable (2020-2022).  

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.

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